Topic Archives: Tool Roundups

It’s been an honor to have Beeminder founders Daniel Reeves and Bethany Soule participating in Quantified Self meetings, giving us a chance to watch the evolution of their very useful tool for setting and achieving personal goals. These days they are working on the forefront of device and service integration. In this talk Daniel gives a brief explanation of how to bring data into Beeminder with minimal hassle.

In response to the much anticipated reveal of the Apple Watch I did a bit of digging around to find out where we stand with wrist-worn wearable devices. I found over 60 different devices. The following list focuses on self-tracking tools, I intentionally left out those that work only as notification centers or secondary displays for your phone. I’m sure this isn’t all of them, but it’s as good a place to start as any. If you’re using one of these devices to learn something about yourself, or you’re just interested in these type of wearable tools we invite you to join us in San Francisco on June 18-20, 2015, for our QS15 Conference & Exposition.

(Thank you to all those who commented here, on Twitter, and on our Facebook group pointing us to additional devices to add!)

What is the Scanadu Scout™?
Scanadu Scout™ is designed to be a medical grade Tricorder using your smartphone and Bluetooth LE that emulates an Emergency Room in your pocket. It can read your heart rate, skin temperature, core body temp, SPO2, respiratory rate, blood pressure, ECG, and emotional stress. Simply place the scout on your forehead for 10 seconds and snap, your stats are displayed on your smartphone.

With strong feedback from the community, partners, and regulators, and a strong push from Scanadu’s engineers and researchers, the company has made three key breakthroughs:

Scout others as well as yourself: Just like Mr. Spock, you can now Scout someone else – an ailing parent or sick child. With this breakthrough, Scanadu made some key changes to the design. It is now circular in shape, with the sensors built into the front of the device.

Make your health feed accessible from a one-stop-shop: You’ll be able to collect readings from Scanadu’s suite of products – including Project ScanaFlo – through one integrated app. Seeing your comprehensive health feed allows for data fusion, and the potential to read more vitals such as cuff less, non-invasive blood pressure. Scanadu Scout supporters will receive free paddles.

Increased the computational power of the device: Scanadu has added more horsepower to the device, taking it from 8 bytes (the power of an Apple II) to 32 bytes (the power of a smartphone). The new device is built on Micrium, NASA’s real-time operation system for SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) on the Rover Curiosity.

Where are We in Development?
We have a prototype device that is designed to be an exploratory tool, to interface with medical accessories to measure vitals signs and reagents.

Scanadu Scout™ is not yet FDA approved, and hence it is not a medical device and makes no medical claims. However, to bring the Scanadu Scout™ to the vast consumer market, we still have to file with the FDA. Right now we are giving access to our first version as an exploratory tool, where you and your community are the researchers! By helping us collect future data, we can file our application to the FDA for market approval for an over-the-counter consumer-grade diagnostic tool. As a research tool, the product will not pose any risk to users and can be used to collect, store and display all your information, but without making specific disease diagnoses.

Scanadu will also be offering an early bird special of $149 for the device to the first 1,000 participants. Additional units will be made available at the anticipated retail price of $199. And of course very cool perks for Bodyhackers, Quantified Selfers, Makers, Bio Trekkies and Citizen Doctors! We manufacture in the USA, shipping is worldwide and planned for Q1 2014, and if we ‘re early, it will be a nice surprise:-)

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If you’re a loyal, or even infrequent user of the Zeo sleep tracking device then you’ve probably heard the sad news that the company has shut down. This opens up a lot of questions about what is means to make consumer devices in this day and age, but rather than focus on those issues we’ld like to talk a bit about data.

Zeo has been unfortunately a little quiet on the communication front and there are quite a few users out there who are wondering about what will happen to all those restless nights and sound sleeps that were captured by their device. This has been compounded by the fact that the Zeo website went down for a short time (it is up as of this writing) closing off access to user accounts and the data therein. Lucky for you there have been quite a few enterprising and enthusiastic individuals who have taken the time to create or highlight ways to capture and store your Zeo data.

Use The Zeo Website
You can’t fault Zeo with making it hard to access your own data. As long as their website is up you can easily download your sleep data from by logging into your user account at mysleep.myzeo.com. After logging into your account you will see a link on the right hand side labeled “Export Data.” Click that link and you’ll be able to download a CSV file containing all your sleep data. They’ve even provided a description of the data and formats that you can download here.

Eric Blue’s FreeMyZeo Data Exporter
QS Los Angeles Meetup Organizer and hacker extraordinaire whipped up a simple data export tool using the Zeo API. The great thing about Eric’s is that even if the myZeo web portal goes down this tool should continue to work.

Download Data Directly From the Device
If you’re using a Zeo bedside device then you can continue to use it and download the data directly from the memory card without relying on uploading it to the Zeo website. In order to do this you’ll have to read the documentation and use the Data Decoder Library. These files are hard to find as they’ve been removed from the Zeo developer website, but you can access them from our Forum thanks to our friend Dan Dascalesu. Zeo also created a viewer using this library that you can use via this Sourceforge page.

If you’ve found another way to download Zeo data please let us know. You can also participate in the great forum discussion that inspired this post.

A quick post here to highlight some interesting developments in the heart rate tracking space. Tracking and understanding heart rate has been a cornerstone of self-tracking since, well since someone put two fingers on their neck and decided to write down how many pulses they felt. We’ve come a long way from that point. If you’re like me tracking heart rate popped up on your radar when you started training for a sporting event like a marathon or long distance cycling. Like many who used the pioneering devices from Polar it felt a bit odd to strap that hard piece of plastic around my chest. After time, and seeing the benefits of tracking heart rate, it became part of my daily ritual. Yet, for all the great things heart rate monitoring can do for physical training, there have been very few advances to provide people with a noninvasive method. That is, until now.

Thearn, an enterprising Github user and developer, has released an open source tool that uses your webcam to detect your pulse. The Webcam Pulse Detector is a python application that uses a variety of tools such as OpenCV (an open source computer vision tool) to “find the location of the user’s face, then isolate the forehead region. Data is collected from this location over time to estimate the user’s heartbeat frequency. This is done by measuring average optical intensity in the forehead location, in the subimage’s green channel alone.” If you’re interested in the research that made this work possible check out the amazing work on Eulerian Video Magnification being conducted at MIT. Now, getting it to work is a bit of a hurdle, but it does appear to be working for those who have the technical expertise. If you get it working please let us know in the comments. Hopefully someone comes along that provides a bit of an easier installation solution for those of us who shy away from working in the terminal. Until then, there are actually quite a few mobile applications that use similar technology to detect and track heart rate:

Here at QS Labs we’ve been curious about the differences between two of the most popular devices among self-trackers: The Nike+ FuelBand and the FitBit. I’m the latest experimenter on this topic, and since January I’ve been wearing a FuelBand on my left wrist and a FitBit (original model) in the right hand coin pocket of my jeans. The FitBit almost always counts significantly more steps than the FuelBand.

The details are interesting. When Bastian compared his FuelBand vs his Fitbit, he found a slight correlation between his activity level and the difference in the number of steps they counted. In other words, them more active he was, the more the two devices disagreed. When Ernesto did his FuelBand vs Fitbit test, his numbers closely matched. My data is more like Bastian’s, but with the effect of high activity even clearer. Look at the graph below. On the vertical axis is the difference in step count, by day. On the horizontal access is the number of daily steps Fitbit counted. The higher the number of “FitBit steps,” the more likely it is that “Fuelband steps” are much lower.

A month ago we showed you what we thought was the quintessential example of how Quantified Self is becoming more of a mainstream activity. During a trip to the Apple store we identified over 20 different Quantified Self devices. Another outing led me into one of the largest consumer electronics stores in the US: Best Buy.

Here, I counted over 25 different tracking devices on the shelves. I’ve split them into three categories here so you can get a sense of just how many different devices are available. With a bit of internet sleuthing I also found that additional devices are available at different stores so you might see something different in your local Best Buy.

We are not the only ones curious about whether our activity level looks different when seen with different trackers. Bastian Greshake, co-founder of OpenSNP.org, has been comparing his FuelBand and his Fitbit for months. Here’s what he found.

Inspired by Ernesto’s post I wanted to take a look at how my data for the Fitbit and the FuelBand compare to each other. I started wearing the FuelBand in October of last year. Since then it has only left my wrist to recharge the battery. I was already carrying a Fitbit Ultra, which I’ve had since May 2012. I wear the FuelBand on my dominant arm. The Fitbit is usually clipped to the pocket of my jeans and I have it on my non-dominant arm while sleeping. From my day-to-day experience I have a sense that FuelBand steps are usually a good way below the Fitbit steps. But I also thought that the difference was getting smaller, probably due to firmware updates on the FuelBand.

Using the Fitbit-API (and it’s integration into openSNP) it’s quite easy to get a file that contains all step counts measured with the Ultra. If you have an openSNP account you can download the complete file, also including sleep data and body measurements here. Unfortunately the Nike+ API isn’t ready yet, so one needs to manually scrape the data. As this is boring work that can’t easily be automated I only got FuelBand step data back to 2013/11/16. Still, that should be enough to get a first insight on how both devices compare.

Gary and I were inspired to start looking into activity tracker data by James Wolcott’s comment in his recent Vanity Fair Story:

According to Fitbit, I took 7,116 steps on November 27; Jawbone has me at 2,192, a bit of a discrepancy. I prefer to believe Fitbit’s higher tally is the correct one, because that is the cotton-candy cloud on which I dwell, but perhaps I’m fooling myself and Jawbone has me accurately pegged as a potted fern. Further testing is clearly indicated, as they say in those clinical trials.

Wolcott is talking about the Jawbone Up. Neither of us own a Jawbone UP (yet), but we were nonetheless curious: do common activity trackers agree? We know that this could be studied rigorously, but the first step is just to find out what happens in our own real use. Gary had a Fuelband, I had a Fitbit. Each of us bought the one we were missing. We focused mostly on step counts as this is one of the most common metrics that activity trackers provide.

Last week we brought you a look into some of the interesting Quantified Self tools that were debuted at CES. Here are a few more we noticed from the deluge of CES coverage. Thanks to MobiHealthNews, Gizmodo, Engadget and many QS friends for the tips.

The Zensorium Tinke is a small sensor and companion app for iOS devices dedicated to helping users understand their health and wellness. This is a really interesting variation on the emerging theme of Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability self-monitoring. The Tinke has no battery and no screen. Instead, the small optical sensor plugs directly into the iPhone.
Measures: Heart Rate, Heart Rate Variability, Blood Oxygen, Respiratory Rate

A similar approach is used by the Masimo iSpO2, where the focus is on blood oxygenation.
Measures: Blood Oxygenation, Heart Rate, Perfusion Index
Salutron

Mio Alpha
The Mio Alpha boasts of continuous and strapless heart rate measurement. Using technology developed by Phillips, the Alpha uses optical heart rate sensing at the wrist and a soon to be released mobile app. What once seemed like difficult technical magic is on the verge of becoming commonplace.
The Mio Measures: Heart Rate
Sync: Bluetooth 4.0

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